


The Hanged Man

by elviaprose



Category: Blake's 7, Kill the Dead - Tanith Lee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-07
Updated: 2014-09-07
Packaged: 2018-02-16 11:59:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2268849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elviaprose/pseuds/elviaprose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A prequel (ish) to Aralias's Life is for The Living. Parl Dro meets Rath Thom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hanged Man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aralias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aralias/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Life is for the Living](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1020747) by [aralias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aralias/pseuds/aralias). 



“The first ghost you killed. How did it happen?”  

The inn should have been deserted except for Dro, since it was late morning, but it wasn’t. Last night’s lodgers had departed, and tonight’s had yet to arrive.  Still, someone was here, speaking to him. He took the man in with a lazy, ungenerous glance. Here was a man near his age, perhaps a few years younger, but with a face that promised, with its deep circles under the eyes and too-mobile mouth, to wear heavily. His hair was a riot of curls, but his beard was closely cropped. He was dressed simply, but the clothes were well made, and looked as though they’d last.  Perhaps longer than their wearer would, if he kept bothering Dro. 

“Why?” Dro asked.

“I’m interested.”

“Isn’t everyone?”

“Yes, that’s true,” the other man said mildly. “But not everyone is willing to pay to learn.” He drew out a coin pouch.

“I don’t take apprentices.”

The man chuckled, a brief sound, but rich with arrogance.

“No, I don’t suppose you do. That shouldn’t be a problem. Indulge me.”

“I’m not an indulgent man.”

The man’s eyes shifted to the three empty tankards in front of Dro, as if to say, _you seem to be indulging yourself right now._

“In my experience,” the man explained, “when you tell a tale, you live it again, and I’m prepared to pay accordingly. How much silver did they give you for that first ghost?”

“Gold,” Dro corrected. “Ten guineas.” He kept his voice bone dry.  If the man took that sum as an invitation to go and fornicate with his own mother, he was welcome to do so.  If he was stupid enough to meet Dro’s price, that was his problem.

It was a lie, of course. The first ghost he’d killed had been Silky, and that he’d done for the price of his own innocence. The second he’d done for a pound bag of silver. That money had been offered not to kill a ghost, but to sleep the night in a haunted barn, where the glove of a dead thing hung nailed to a post. They’d hoped he’d go insane and give them another good tale to tell in the process. What his instinct had driven him to—setting fire to the barn--had not been what anyone had hoped of him, and unsurprisingly they hadn’t paid him a penny piece for it. Hardly the stuff songs were made of. 

The man counted out the coins and set them on the table. Dro smiled. He didn’t let himself feel relief—or at least not much—at the sight. It had been a long time since he’d had to worry about money, and he wasn't accustomed to having to worry now. For that price he supposed he could give the man a story.  He had skill enough with words, and experience enough in his trade, to spin this fool a fine yarn, if not one worth ten guineas. 

He let himself enjoy the telling. His love of showmanship was a vice he allowed himself, under the right circumstances.

“Quite a tale,” the man said neutrally when he was done.  “My first dead-alive wasn’t nearly so remarkable.”

Dro grimaced.  So the man was a ghost-killer, and an unlikable one at that. Not that they were usually the sort a sociable man would want to pass an hour’s time with. Not that Dro could speak for the sociable man, of course, but he could assume.

“Rath Thom,” the man said, extending his hand.

Dro offered no hand in return, instead taking a swallow of his drink. He resented the man for drawing him out, then having a laugh at his expense, though he knew that kind of skill in trickery to be useful to a ghost-killer. The man might well be good at his trade.

“Yes, I suppose you needn’t introduce yourself,” Thom said, as though that was why Dro had withheld his hand. “I know who you are. Tell me, Parl Dro, how long do you believe instinct can stand in for purpose?”

“Purpose?” Dro said acidly. “What purpose?”

“Yes,” the man said, sounding surprisingly angry.  “Purpose is one thing you obviously lack. A false tale can tell as much as a true one, and your tale isn’t the first I’ve heard of you. I don’t doubt you have a keen instinct, perhaps keener still than mine. It’s a pity you have no sense of justice or mercy. Simply compulsion--”

“Well, there’s no need to worry about me,” Dro cut him off. “I’m out of the business.”

When Thom gave him a shocked look, Dro smiled and added, “When they told you where to find me, didn’t they tell you I’d been crippled?”

“They told me you’d been injured. What will you do?”

“Oh, I’ll adapt,” he said, hoping he spoke the truth. It had been three weeks since they’d pulled him from the river, and in that time he had scarcely left the inn they’d carried him back to. He’d taken a bed, planning to sleep there just one day, but the fact that he could hardly take a step limited his options considerably. Oh, he was making some progress, able to limp a little further every day. He didn’t really see how it mattered, though. What could he do? Before he’d taken up as a ghost-killer, he’d earned his keep doing farm work: an alternative that was now surely as impossible as anything he might actually desire to do with himself.

“Will you? Not everyone will be so quick to hand over their guineas for so little reward,” Thom said, breaking into his thoughts with the least welcome remark he could imagine.

Furious, Dro pushed the coins back across the table at him and snarled the worst curse he knew: “Let your ghost never have rest. Let it roam the earth in suffering until the end of all things.”

Rath Thom departed with a curt half bow. Dro slid the coins Thom had left behind into his own purse and hoped he was gone for good.

*** 

He wasn’t. Parl Dro knew he was an easy man to find, staying as he did in the same inn day after day.  If anyone had a perverse enough mind want to find him, and Rath Thom obviously did.

“Two beers,” he told the innkeeper, seating himself beside Dro as though they’d parted on the best of terms, “and fresh drink for Parl Dro.”

“Didn’t my curse trouble you?” Dro asked wryly.

“Superstitious nonsense,” Thom said, raising his tankard, as if in a toast.  “I suppose you’re also a sworn celibate.”

***

He wasn’t. Three weeks later found Dro sitting on his bed, his eyes distant and leg stretched out in front of him, trying to ease the pain enough to let him take a few more steps. Having fallen back on what he knew was a dangerous habit, he was thinking of Thom.  

Thom had visited Dro the next day, and the next, and the next after that, until days slid into weeks.  He had a way of drawing Dro into a conversation against his better judgment. Dro tried his best to avoid talking back, all too aware of how much Thom could surmise from just a few words, but it was difficult to resist offering a rejoinder or two. Thom’s practices tended towards the rash, and his methods towards the unconventional. If that wasn’t challenge enough to Dro’s resolve not to rise to the bait, Thom frequently railed on about his own noble purpose. Thom believed in making the world a place where the quick felt joy and the dead did not suffer. Dro thought that was nonsense and told him so whenever the topic arose. Dro thought that for someone who believed in spreading joy and peace, Thom was often rather sour, petulant, and thoughtless. This he hadn’t told Thom, perhaps because he didn’t trust himself to make the jibe sound like anything other than a compliment.

When he heard a knock at the door to his room, he cursed, but it was too late to do anything about it.

“Come in, sit down, make yourself comfortable,” he said as bitingly as he could.

“Thank you,” Thom said, seating himself companionably beside Dro on his bed. “How’s your leg?” 

“Assuming that name even still applies? Agonizing.  Torturous.” He offered Thom a crooked smile. “That is to say, considerably improved.”

Before Parl Dro knew what was happening, Thom’s hands were holding his face steady and still while Thom kissed him. Dro was surprised, but not terribly.  He supposed that just as they both were possessed of a seventh sense, they both must posses that queer twist that made it possible to enjoy men as well as women.  

“I told you it was still agonizing,” he finally snapped, but that was after he’d listened raptly to Thom’s groans as he let Thom take his pleasure between his thighs.  And after he’d reached his own completion in a white-hot blaze and sighed his relief, dragging the sharp smell of oil and sex deep into his lungs.

“And how does it feel now?” Thom asked, grinning.

“Worse,” he said, which was the truth. “A more terrible trial than looking at you.”

“Perhaps I’m just growing on you,” Thom replied easily.

***

The days went fast because they were all nearly the same. This was not a new discovery for Dro. His life had been one of rhythms even after he’d given up the life of a farmer and begun walking town to town, killing one ghost after the next.  Now the time hurried by because each day was spent limping his way around in the morning and making love and quarrelling lightly with Thom until afternoon slipped slyly into night. On the day of the summer solstice, they walked together on the cobbled main-street of the village until it gave way to the twisting path that led into the hills. Then they wound their way still higher into the imperceptibly fading sky until they could look down and see the sign of the inn where Dro stayed.

“The Hanged Man Inn,” Thom mused, squinting at the figure. 

“I’d forgotten the name,” Dro said, gratefully easing himself to the ground.

“Where were you headed, before--?" Thom asked.

“It all went to pieces?” Dro interrupted. “Why, the next town over, of course. There’s usually a ghost. Perhaps you’ll know before the week is out if they do have one. If you come with me.”

“I don’t think I ought to follow you there.” 

“No doubt you think it wouldn’t be large enough for the two of us.  Funny that this one seems to be,” Dro said with dry amusement that covered a swift-striking anxiety. If Thom had stayed with him all this time, surely he wouldn’t leave him now.

“It would be a waste to walk these quiet village roads together, when one of us could very likely manage any ghost we came across.”

“Have you some other suggestion?” Dro asked, listening to himself speak as though from a great, panic-induced distance, marveling at the flatness of his own voice.

“Ghyste Mortua,” Thom said, looking intently at Dro. “No one has ever succeeded alone. Together--”

He should have been relieved, but it wasn’t enough, not after that. “What about my lack of purpose? Haven’t you forgotten?” Dro asked abruptly, feeling curiously fragile and in need of a reassurance he wasn’t accustomed to wanting and which he didn’t know how to ask for.

“Of course not,” Thom said, leaning back and closing his eyes against the light. “But I suspect you’ve found yours.”

Dro kissed Thom hard, hating him for not giving him what he wanted, for not telling him what he needed to hear, but knowing he had asked precisely the wrong question and could expect no better.

***

That night Parl Dro lay in the darkness a long time, thinking about what Thom had said. The truth was, he did indeed have a purpose.  Rath Thom—the very fact of him when they were together, and the memory of him when they were apart--had given him a purpose. But it wasn’t a purpose in the way Thom understood the word—some higher sense of his calling, something you could explain simply and clearly to a stranger well- or ill-met at the Hanged Man Inn. It was simply a determination, a resolve, a knowledge that he could continue on, over the miles and days and years.

But how could he tell Thom that?  How could he trust that if he did tell him, Rath Thom would not see him once more as Dro had first appeared to him: a man without mercy or justice, and worthy of his contempt? 

He loved Thom too deeply to live beside him. He couldn’t endure the fear that one day he might look into Thom’s eyes and see hatred for who and what he was.

When he had finished dressing, a thought struck him. Dro tugged one glove off his hand and dropped it on the pillow where Thom slept, creating an echo only he could appreciate. He had never told Thom about the glove nailed to the post, about the ghost in the barn where he’d sheltered, and yet Thom had heard the story he hadn’t told, known him for what he was. He hadn’t wanted that understanding then. Now, he didn’t dare hope for it.

Outside the inn, he drew his cloak around him and walked into the night, towards Ghyste Mortua, his limping stride sure and unflagging.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Some notes on (some of?) the Kill the Dead references:
> 
> Silky was Parl Dro's childhood love. She died, and he killed her ghost.
> 
> In this universe, there's a rumor that celibacy makes ghost killers more powerful, but it seems to be just a rumor.
> 
> Tanith Lee loves her Tarot cards, but the Hanged Man doesn't appear in the novel. Parl Dro is supposedly the King of Swords.
> 
> Ghyste Mortua is a big scary ghost village, and Parl Dro's destination at the beginning of the novel.


End file.
